Forbes CommunityVoice™ allows professional fee-based membership groups ("communities") to connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create content – and participate in the conversation – on the Forbes digital publishing platform. Each topic-based CommunityVoice™ is produced and managed by the group.

Opinions expressed within Forbes CommunityVoice™ are those of the participating individuals.

In my last post, I covered the CEO’s role in managing culture, and today we’ll take a look at the other side of the coin: addressing culture when you’re not at the top of the organizational chart. In general, those who lack words like “chief,” “vice president” or “director” in their title tend to underestimate their influence on culture. For some reason, we look up and assume that it is the people above us in the hierarchy who must define and shape the workplace culture, rather than ourselves.

This is simply not true. Yes, your position in the hierarchy brings power, and that includes power to influence culture, but culture, by definition, is brought to life by the all the words, behaviors and assumptions inside your organization — and that includes everyone. It’s a group effort. So to imply that you lack the ability to shape culture simply because not enough people report to you is missing the point.

Instead of worrying about the greater power others may have, focus on the power you do have. For example, a lot of companies I work with struggle with cross-functional communication and collaboration. When we measure their culture’s approach to collaboration, we often notice an interesting contrast. On one hand, there is an emphasis on supporting individuals inside the company to help each other and work together (as individuals), but on the other hand, there is not as much support for proactive information sharing across department lines or breaking down internal boundaries or territories. In other words, they support the human side of collaboration, but not as much on the process/structure side.

If you are faced with a culture challenge like that, yet lack ultimate internal authority, here are two things you could do:

Run some experiments.

Florence Nightingale gave us a phrase that is one of our favorites when advising people on how to change culture without formal power: “Proceed until apprehended.” Instead of waiting for the higher-ups to “get it,” craft an experiment or two that will demonstrate the value of a new approach. They key here is to design the experiment in a way that produces measurable results as quickly as possible, because when they do “apprehend” you for trying something new, it helps a lot when you can show them some results.

To address the collaboration issue, for instance, you could start convening a group of middle managers from multiple departments on a weekly basis to do cross-functional troubleshooting. At some point, people might notice the time it takes to run these meetings, or even interpret them as some kind of power grab, and object to them. Congratulations. You’ve been “apprehended.” But when you can give them a list of specific problems that were successfully avoided because of the proactive conversation in these meetings, then you’re much more likely to be allowed to continue the process.

Leaders love results. By showing them real results, you end up convincing people higher in the hierarchy that your new approach has value. That, in and of itself, is changing the culture.

Make the culture visible.

Even when you can’t directly change the culture, you can have a big impact by making certain dynamics inside your culture more visible to more people. We find that many culture problems persist not because the higher-ups don’t “get it,” but simply because they don’t see it.

So even if you are not in the position to change many of the existing processes or structures related to collaboration, you could be in the position to illuminate some of the bottlenecks they are producing. Here, your focus would be primarily on internal communications. You, your peers and your supervisors are focused on doing the work of your functional area (which makes sense, of course).

But how could you introduce some new perspectives into your everyday work conversations that would shed light on the collaboration bottlenecks? Maybe some departments require you to get approval to work cross-functionally, where others are more flexible. That’s the kind of thing you could bring up in a team meeting to make sure managers know this is happening. They may not do anything about it right away, but the more that becomes visible, the more likely it will be addressed.

As the old saying goes, the only thing you control is your own behavior, and that advice is particularly pertinent when it comes to culture. The more you concentrate your choices on making the culture more visible and demonstrating the value of new approaches, the more you will be able to single-handedly change the culture.